


Dust and Ashes

by AllegoriesInMediasRes



Category: Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1974), The Great Gatsby (2013)
Genre: F/M, Free Verse, Juvenilia, Originally written in 2015, Poetry, Semi-Canonical Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-18
Updated: 2017-07-18
Packaged: 2018-12-03 17:01:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11536548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllegoriesInMediasRes/pseuds/AllegoriesInMediasRes
Summary: “But for as long as I can remember/ There have been only ashes.”Myrtle Wilson’s epitaph, in the form of a poem.





	Dust and Ashes

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written back in 2015 for a high school junior English assignment. 
> 
> The prompt: write an epitaph for one of the characters from _The Great Gatsby_.

I was born amidst ashes and dust  
My mother would brush the dust off our creaky old table  
And exhort the presence of God in it and in everything else,  
In the laundry washed by her hands that had become mottled before thirty  
And in the ash that embedded itself in our pores  
In the borrowed suit of the pathetic, stuttering man I married  
And in the garage that we lived over  
And in the life of being Mrs. George Wilson, the garage man’s wife.

But for as long as I can remember  
There have been only ashes.  
Ashes in our cramped little apartment.  
But in the high-class parties that my sister Catherine threw  
And in that man I met on the subway  
There was neither ashes nor God  
Something else I was almost afraid to name.

I thought I had it all  
A man who loved me  
Who could hurt me but love me so much at the same time  
My mother would have said that God was there, keeping him apart from me  
In the form of his Catholic wife  
And in the stroke of luck that led George to realize that I’d found a man worthy of me  
And to lock me in my room, so he could drag me out to some gas station out in the West.

She would have said that it was His work that led me  
To run out onto the street  
And into that yellow car.  
How would Tom feel to know that,  
Just as he could break me and put me back together in an instant,  
He was the one to shatter me forever?  
How would his wife feel?  
But as I lay dying  
My breast ripped open  
God was not there.  
Tom was not there.  
Daisy was not there.  
Only dust and ashes.  
There was only ever dust and ashes.


End file.
